Svalbard’s set at August’s ArcTanGent festival seems like a moment of triumph. The post-black metal quartet are just a stone’s throw from their home town of Bristol, and the tent is rammed – thousands of heads bob to the band’s frantic, snarling verses, then are stilled for the shimmering and shoegaze-inclined melodies. When singer/guitarist Serena Cherry roars the hook of the song Clickbait – a primal, punkish “Fuck off!” – a legion of voices scream it with her. “That’s never happened before,” she giggles into the microphone afterwards.
Cherry seems jubilant, but when she and I sit down backstage shortly after the set, she reveals that the elation was merely a mask. “You’ve probably seen me on stage smiling for 35 minutes,” she says, “but I’m at one of the lowest points of my life at the moment.”
Since she formed Svalbard with co-singer/guitarist Liam Phelan in 2011, Cherry has been open about the fact she has depression, both in her lyrics and during interviews. It’s something she’s suffered from since childhood. “I remember having this overwhelming sadness, even as a young child,” she says, “and I remember feeling isolated.”
However, the musician says she entered a “downward spiral” in 2020. Since the pandemic Svalbard have released the lauded When I Die, Will I Get Better? album and signed to Nuclear Blast Records – home to some of metal’s biggest names including Cherry’s favourite band, Nightwish – but the constant work of being a musician, alongside a day job at a gaming magazine, has become a struggle.
“I’m so lucky to be in a job I love and a band I love,” Cherry says, “but it leaves very little room for you to exist and connect with people. The last three years, I’ve become a lot more lonely and massively lost confidence. Sometimes it feels like every message on my phone is a demand or a request.”
Cherry voices her difficult life to evocative effect on Svalbard’s impending fourth album, The Weight of the Mask. Opening track and recent single Faking It laments the type of thing she had to do on stage earlier today: feigning joy when you’re in fact deeply unhappy. “I don’t recognise that smile,” Cherry howls over cascading black metal. “How is it so convincing?” November expresses the cyclical nature of depression over a soundtrack of solemn and patient post-rock – “I thought every day that I wouldn’t feel this bad again” – and apart from How to Swim Down, which likens unrequited love to drowning, Cherry rejects the flowery language and metaphors commonplace in metal. “I don’t feel love, I just fake it,” she screams, unforgettably, at the climax of Faking It.
“It was a very deliberate choice to be as lyrically direct as possible,” she says. “You could listen to a song by most metal bands and it might be about depression or something political but, dressed up in prose and poetry, that message becomes obscured. If you say something as concisely as possible, you can reach as many people as possible.”
A song called How Do We Stop It? – from Svalbard’s 2018 second album, It’s Hard to Have Hope – revisited the trauma the singer/guitarist felt after being groped in a moshpit as a teenager. “If it’s in a dark alley or it’s in a mosh pit, it’s still sexual assault – how do we stop it?” run the lyrics.
“I came home and I sold every single metal shirt I had,” Cherry remembers. “I stopped going to metal shows, everything. I took a real step back from all of it. I could not believe that this had happened in a supposedly safe, expressive place.”
However, the song also rallies the audience to share their experiences of sexual assault in the metal scene, so that no victim feels alone: “Everyone, come forward! Come forward! We need to raise awareness!” Listen to Someone from 2020 explores the effects of depression and advises “listen to someone without judgment”, while new song Defiance is about the victory of going to the gym when your mental health tries to keep you down.
For some listeners her approach may feel prosaic, but Svalbard’s lyrics are an expression of Cherry’s admirably clear ethical code. “What can we do, as individuals, to make the tiniest amount of change?” she says. “The lyrical pattern of ‘this is shit – how do we change it?’ – that’s the light at the end of the tunnel. The nicest thing a Svalbard fan could say to me is that our music made them feel less alone.” That in turn, she says, “really helps me to not feel alone.”
• The Weight of the Mask out now on Nuclear Blast
